this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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[–] BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com 91 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

Is it just me or the clocks frequently break or change appearance without the page being refreshed?

Edit: nevermind, I skipped past the sentence explaining that every minute, the site prompts LLMs for a new solution. This is hilariously sad how LLMs aren't able to be consistent from one prompt to another.

[–] Carighan@piefed.world 42 points 2 months ago

It's the expected result if your big ol' artificial intelligence wannabe is ultimately just a stochastic word combinator.

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

if every single token is, at the end, chosen by random dice roll (and they are) then this is exactly what you'd expect.

[–] kersplomp@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 months ago (5 children)

that’s a massive oversimplification

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[–] null@piefed.nullspace.lol 4 points 2 months ago

This is hilariously sad how LLMs aren’t able to be consistent from one prompt to another.

Typically that's configurable. Like for a chatbot, you'd want it to give the same/similar results for a given question, where with a character creator, you might want the results to vary so you can re-run until you get something you like.

Of course that wouldn't be as funny here.

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[–] criticon@lemmy.ca 71 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] Shaper@lemmy.world 23 points 2 months ago (1 children)
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[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 59 points 2 months ago (4 children)

The last one, Kimi K2, has been consistently good as long as I've been looking at it. That's pretty impressive.

The rest are hilarious!

Deepseek has a recognisable clock now and then, too. They both mix up the current time, though.

[–] huppakee@piefed.social 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

By far the best, but still off. These three were loaded in the same order as i post them:

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

I dig the square clock, and am now sad that the numbers can't be put into the corners on a real clock. Unless they're shifted from the usual position.

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[–] Hazzard@lemmy.zip 13 points 2 months ago

Haha, I found myself thinking the same thing, and then caught myself, realizing all the other LLMs on this page had lowered the bar immensely for what I'm considering impressive.

[–] Enkrod@feddit.org 12 points 2 months ago

I thought the same and then Kimi K2 came up with a clock that has two 12 and no 11...

[–] crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 39 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's funny how GPT-5 is consistently the worst one, and it's not even close.

[–] snooggums@piefed.world 18 points 2 months ago

qwen 2.5 is absolutely pants on head ridiculous compared to gpt5 when I'm looking at it right now.

[–] dimjim@sh.itjust.works 22 points 2 months ago

Some of these are absolutely hilarious

[–] sheepishly@fedia.io 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Given that the AI models are basically constructing these "blindly"- using the language model to string together html and javascript without really being able to check how it looks- some of these are actually pretty impressive. But also making the AI do things it's bad at is funny. Reminds me of all the AI ASCII art fails...

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[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

What is this obsession with clocks recently?

[–] Panties@lemmy.ca 25 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I don't know if it's actually related, but I've read that asking people to draw a clock face is a simple way to identify some brain problems

Quick screening for dementia, according to this

Edit: I guess this means most of the AI has 'Conceptual Deficits', pretty accurate lol

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Would be funny if AI models are generating such wildly useless "clocks" because they ingested too many dementia screening tests in their training data

[–] altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 months ago

There is someone training the biggest, bestest model to draw clock faces to pass that test as we speak.

[–] tomiant@piefed.social 10 points 2 months ago

I'm guessing it's an easy metric to compare benchmarks. "Write a clock".

[–] QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.works 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

qwen is trying her best 😭😔

[–] zerofk@lemmy.zip 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

So far, I’d give qwen the prize for most artistic impression of a clock.

Kimi K2 appears to consistently get it right.

[–] zerofk@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 months ago

And just as I typed that, Kimi made one where 9 and 10, and 11 and 12 overlapped.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 10 points 2 months ago

I don't even

I was surprised that both Grok and Gemini 2.5 got it right once, only to fuck it up on the refresh

[–] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 9 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Not really world clocks, they just try to use JavaScript to display the device's time.

[–] TechLich@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago

No JavaScript I think, it's just html and CSS. The initial time is provided in the prompt every minute according to the description. I wonder if they'd be any better if they could use js. Probably not.

[–] tomiant@piefed.social 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

"Time is a relative of mine" / Eisenstein

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Deepseek seems to have the only functional clock.

[–] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago

Depends on when you load it. They refresh every minute. In the first one I got, Deepseek's was almost functional, but Haiku had one that was surprisingly good.

I've never seen any of the OpenAI models come up with anything that was more than completely broken.

[–] huppakee@piefed.social 4 points 2 months ago

I thought the same, until it refreshed and it got worse and it refreshed and it was different but still bad. These three were loaded in the order as posted:

[–] tomiant@piefed.social 7 points 2 months ago

You know, I don't, and what the fuck?

[–] Bazell@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well, KIMI K2 seems to have created the working one. Others failed. I suppose that this model was optimized for this while others not.

[–] SolarBoy@slrpnk.net 8 points 2 months ago

The clocks change every minute. I've seen some from deepseek and qwen that looked ok. But kimi seems to be the most consistent

[–] kersplomp@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Really cool idea, but the site seems a bit biased for the chinese models, or is otherwise set up weird. I’m not able to reproduce how consistently bad the others are in web dev arena, which generally accepted as the gold standard for testing AI web dev ability.

[–] AppleTea@lemmy.zip 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Each model is allowed 2000 tokens to generate its clock. Here is its prompt: Create HTML/CSS of an analog clock showing ${time}. Include numbers (or numerals) if you wish, and have a CSS animated second hand. Make it responsive and use a white background. Return ONLY the HTML/CSS code with no markdown formatting.

are you using the same prompt?

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